During the time of slaughter no general blackout was ever declared on the U.S. East Coast. While the British and German coasts, which were quiescent in the same period, practiced total light elimination, the endangered U.S. littoral remained lighted. Dimout and shielding was as far as King would go. The Army concurred. So did the general public, which wanted business and pleasure as usual. Civilian avarice and carelessness must take their places on the list of agents accountable for the U-boat triumphs.
The USN destroyer (DD) with its speed, maneuverability, firepower, sound gear, and ability to keep the sea in thick weather, was everybody’s ship of choice against the U-boat. It was also during March and April the most maldistributed weapons platform in the Atlantic fleet. Of seventy-three destroyers assigned to the Atlantic, ordinarily fifteen on the average were laid up for repair and overhaul. Of the remainder, 42 percent were stationed at sea along the arc that ran from Casco Bay, Maine, through Argentia and Hvalfjord to Londonderry, Northern Ireland, where during March only 6 percent of Allied world tonnage lost to U-boats could be counted. It bears repeating that, by contrast, inside the Eastern Sea Frontier protectorate that ran five hundred miles seaward from the U.S. shoreline, where 49 percent of Allied tonnage went down in the same period, only 5 percent of destroyer strength was apportioned. In other words, where ships and cargoes were most endangered the least destroyer strength was available.29 Admiral Andrews had struggled futilely to correct this imbalance, beginning in February when he realized the mounting threat to shipping off the Jersey shore, the Delaware and Virginia Capes, Wimble Shoals, and Diamond Shoal. To King he defined fifteen full-time destroyers as his minimum need.30 But in response only one DD, Jacob Jones, was assigned full-time to the frontier and she was sunk on the twenty-eighth. Eleven other DDs were assigned to ESF part-time during the same month, but none remained long before being whisked away to the convoy arc, with the result that there was much lost motion and little defensive contribution by the DD squadrons. On 8 March CINCLANT (Admiral Ingersoll) made the modest concession that while his destroyers made passage through frontier waters to and from repair and overhaul yards, they might be employed for the protection of merchant shipping. By these means Andrews was able to call on the services of two DDs, on average, each day in March—a month in which the U-boat campaign in the frontier reached its full fury.31 By the end of the month either King or Ingersoll, or both, finally noticed the dislocation of destroyer strength and assigned eight DDs to the frontier on temporary service; but only nine days into April all but two were vacuumed away for the “essential escort of convoys.”32 Then on 16 April King swung the other way again and ordered CINCLANT to assign three DDs to ESF “at once” and a total of nine as soon as possible.33 When the promised nine came on station at the end of the month a harried Andrews held his breath; but to his relief, during May sixteen DDs patrolled in the frontier, some for as many as twenty-one days, some for as few as two.
Andrews began receiving help from other quarters in the same period. In a reversal of the 1940 fifty-destroyer deal, Winston Churchill sent across twenty-four antisubmarine trawlers with trained crews. COMINCH accepted the gift graciously. Following overhaul the coal-burning trawlers with their nine- to eleven-knot speed were put into service beginning the last week of March. They bore such names as HMS Lady Rosemary, Bedfordshire, and Northern Duke.34 In face of what he now recognized as “the desperate submarine attack situation along the Atlantic coast,”35 King began to change his mind about the usefulness of small craft. As early as 7 February he authorized Andrews to employ “at sea anywhere within your Frontier” seventy-, seventy-five-, eighty-, and eighty-three-foot Coast Guard cutters and to arm them immediately with depth charges and guns (one pounders and machine .50 caliber).36 By the end of March sixty cutters would be on patrol in the ESF sea-lanes together with other small craft: ten PC and PY patrol vessels, five SC chasers, five PE Eagle boats, two gunboats, and the British trawlers. Andrews also converted five yachts varying in length from 75 to 175 feet to patrol use. The number of combat ships and craft advanced to 150 by the end of June, to 156 by the end of July. Some of these were new PCs and SCs produced in a “sixty vessels in sixty days” program of small-craft construction begun in April.
Slight increases of surface strength could be observed in ESF’s neighboring command, the Gulf Sea Frontier (GSF), which ran from the Duval-Saint Johns County line (above Saint Augustine, Florida) south around the Keys, past the Mississippi River Passes, and down the coasts of Texas and Mexico as far as Belize in British Honduras, where yet another USN sea frontier, the Panama, ranged south and east to Punta de Gallinas, Colombia. Included in the GSF protective area were the Florida Coast and Straits, most of the Bahamas, half of Cuba, the entire Gulf of Mexico and the Yucatan Channel. Until mid-May the GSF barely existed as an independent command, but operated as an extension of the Seventh Naval District (Miami). Key West was the first GSF headquarters as such, though a very unsatisfactory one because of its isolation and poor communications: In order to respond to a U-boat sighting off Cape Canaveral, for example, GSF had to make a commercial telephone call to the Third Army Bomber Command at Charleston in order to request a search by Army aircraft based at nearby Miami!37 The first entrance of U-boats into GSF waters took place on 19 February, when M-128 (Korvettenkapitän Ulrich Heyse), which had originally been scheduled as the sixth boat of Paukenschlag, sank the 8,201-GRT American tanker SS Pan Massachusetts twenty miles off Cape Canaveral. Thereafter Floridians on their beach-cottage decks and tourists on hotel balconies became frequent witnesses to offshore violence. Between 19 February and 14 May sixteen ships were sunk inside Florida territorial waters. Four others were damaged. One loss, that of the neutral Mexican-flag tanker Portrero del Llano eight miles south-southeast of Fowey Rocks near Miami on 14 May, precipitated Mexico’s declaration of war on Germany.
First notice of the entrance of the enemy into the Gulf of Mexico came on 4 May when U-507 (Korvettenkapitän Harro Schacht) sank the 2,686-GRT American freighter Norlindo west-northwest of Key West. During May ships went down in the Gulf itself at a rate approaching one a day, most off the muddy Passes of the Mississippi.38 The onslaught caught the frontier both surprised and ill-prepared. In London, Rodger Winn observed that half the number of U-boats that appeared inside the Gulf during May did so without previous warning: They had not been detected on their departure from France nor on their transatlantic crossings. It occurred to Winn that these might be boats that had been followed across on earlier passages and that now were being supplied and refueled at some isolated site on the south coast of the Gulf, or, less likely, in the Western Caribbean.39 Admiral Andrews’ staff had earlier theorized that U-boats might be making rendezvous with neutral-flag tankers operating out of Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, or Venezuela.40 Neither hypothesis was correct. At no time in the American campaign did U-boats refuel or provision from surface vessels, coasts, or islands.41 What many of them did do, however, accounting for what Winn concluded were unusually lengthy periods on station both in the Gulf and Caribbean, was to rendezvous with newly constructed U-boat tankers of a new type (XIV) immediately dubbed by U-boat men Milchkuh (milch cow). Through aerial photography Winn and Beesly had spotted the first of these, V-459, on her departure from Kiel in April. From her size (1,688 tons surface displacement) and broad beam Winn deduced at the time that she was a minelayer. Lacking access to Special Intelligence because of the TRITON blackout, Winn could not know that northwest of Bermuda in early May, U-459 refueled no fewer than fifteen boats from her stores of seven hundred tons of oil.42 The Type XIV, of which ten were built, carried no torpedoes and mounted only AA guns. “Clumsy,” Dönitz called them—none survived the war—but their capacity to refuel and revictual extended the cruise time of Type IX boats by eight weeks and that of Type VII boats by four, thus producing the equivalent of a marked increase in the number of boats on operational patrol at one time. Dönitz noted that with the supply boats his radius of action ex
tended now to “the Gulf of Mexico and off Panama or down to Cape Town and Bahia.” He also observed that “U-boat losses are now extraordinarily small.”43 Winn counted nearly thirty boats in the Western Atlantic during May, from Nova Scotia to Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean. By the time he and Beesly discovered the reprovisioning activity, three tankers were tending pump at assigned grid positions in the Western Atlantic. Soon there would be six.
To meet the enemy fleet the Gulf Sea Frontier had available two four-piper destroyers, Dahlgren and Noa, two 165-foot Coast Guard cutters, two Treasury-class cutters, four 145-foot cutters, one 125-foot cutter, sixteen 83-foot cutters, three converted yachts, and a small assortment of PCs, SCs and YPs (“Yippies”), the last of which were 75-foot yard-patrol craft originally built to Coast Guard specifications in 1924-25 for interception of Prohibition rumrunners. In the Caribbean Sea Frontier (Rear Admiral John H. Hoover commanding at San Juan de Puerto Rico) surface forces were in far shorter supply, despite the fact that the Dutch islands of Curacao and Aruba were rich sources of gasoline and oil derivatives, that all the bauxite trade and much of the rest of shipping to and from South America sailed past Trinidad, and that the Vichy French governed in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Naval Operating Base (NOB) Trinidad boasted two 500-ton converted yachts, two Yippies, and, after June, one 110-foot sub-chaser. Bases at San Juan, Curacao, and Guantánamo (Cuba) were no better equipped. The Gulf and particularly the Caribbean fleets were heavily overmatched by the southern U-boat dispositions, now reinforced by at-sea support. Little wonder that during May and June more shipping vanished in those two frontiers, sixty-five and eighty-two vessels, respectively, than had gone down the world over in any previous two-month period.
Naval air strength showed some improvement through the first six months of the year. In the ESF long-range air patrol seaward continued to be the responsibility of the Army’s First Bomber Command, which flew almost as many hours in March as it had in the previous two months combined. While the bombers made relatively few attacks, and there were no authenticated kills during the six-month period, their expanded patrol flights had the effect of keeping U-boats submerged for increasing spans of time. It was the Navy that badly wanted a kill. Early in January, Andrews had begged COMINCH for “at least one squadron” of long-range patrol planes from the shore-based Fleet squadrons at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, and Norfolk, but CINCLANT (Ingersoll) objected that he could not make such craft available until Atlantic Fleet Patrol Wing needs had first been satisfied. The shortsightedness of Ingersoll’s turf protection was glaringly apparent on 25 January when, grudgingly, he informed ESF that he would make available Fleet aircraft “for emergency assistance in the combat of enemy submarines” provided that such emergency use did “not interfere unduly with scheduled training operations[!].” As the ESF war diary acidly comments, “Unfortunately, emergencies were the order of the day.”44 Driven by exigencies that incredibly escaped the notice of Ingersoll, Andrews looked in a different direction and found twenty long-range PBY-5 Catalina flying boats manufactured for the Royal Air Force sitting idle at Elizabeth City, N.C., NAS for lack of crews to man them. Why not assign the “Cats” temporarily to ESF? he suggested, but he was turned down in January and again in February.45 Finally, in the last week of March, when he identified seventy idle Vought-Sikorsky OS2U-3 aircraft similarly assigned to the British, Andrews won his point. ESF and Gulf Sea Frontier jointly acquired the planes at a rate of four per day. A grateful Andrews wrote to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox: “I can assure you that no grass will grow under my feet as long as I am in this command.”46 Popularly called the Kingfisher, the OS2U-3 was a two-place (tandem) seaplane, powered by a single 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-985 engine, with a top speed of 177 m.p.h. Designed as an observation plane to be launched by catapult from battleships and cruisers, it had a range with depth bombs of three hours, thus it was useful only for limited coastal patrol.47 Still, for ESF, the “step-child of the Fleet,”48 it was something. And by dribs and drabs additional military aircraft came under ESF command in the months following with the result that by the end of May the frontier had a total of 172 aircraft available in various states of readiness (up from 126 in April) and by the end of June 209 available including blimps in a Fleet Airship Wing.
In the Gulf and Caribbean frontiers the numbers of aircraft also advanced, though more slowly, and as spring turned to summer it was these southern waters, to which Admiral Dönitz was shifting the weight of his offensive now that ESF had begun to button up, that most desperately needed air coverage. For a long while the Gulf command had tried to get by with nineteen unarmed Coast Guard planes, fourteen 0-47 Army observation planes that flew out of Miami armed only with .30-caliber machine guns, and two ancient B-18 “Bolo” bombers that were described as “practically falling apart.”49 By the end of June, however, there were fifty-one depth bomb-equipped OS2U-3s at Banana River, Miami, Key West, San Julien (Cuba), St. Petersburg, and Biloxi, Mississippi, together with a sprinkling of Martin PBM Mariner flying boats and utility amphibians. In an emergency, training aircraft could be scrambled from air stations Banana River, Miami, Key West, Pensacola, and Corpus Christi, Texas. At Municipal Airport, Miami, an Army Air Task Group based twelve B-25, ten B-34, four B-18, and two A-29 bombers. Smaller numbers (one to two) of bombers flew out of Key West, Fort Myers, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Houston, Texas. For emergency use the Army could call on training forces at Tampa (MacDill Field), Sebring and Shreveport, Louisiana.50 In the Caribbean Frontier air strength continued to be much less impressive as the U-boat war reached the six-month mark—only a handful of PBYs and PBMs were added to those forces—and the inadequacy of coverage was one factor leading to losses that would occur throughout those waters long after the U-boats were contained (temporarily) in ESF and the Gulf.
It took Admiral King an uncommonly long time to recognize the truth that in warfare the weaker side must learn to use the weapons that weakness imposes. The Kriegsmarine had recognized this long before: With its surface blue-water fleet frozen in port, the U-boat was the weapon that weakness imposed. King came to realize not only that there was a place for small naval craft after all, but that his weak position imposed as well the use of weapons even less commanding or Navy-like. By March, provoked to act by the British as well as by events, King looked with favor for the first time at civilian yacht clubs and power squadrons. To his desk on the seventh of that month came a letter from the representative of the British Ministry of War Transport in Canada, forwarded by way of Admiral Sir Charles C. J. Little, a member of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington. In it the suggestion was made that, as the British had done at Dunkirk, the Americans might want to press into service a volunteer fleet of private small craft that could assist the Navy with patrolling and rescue. King directed Admiral Stark, who was still on board at the time, to “advise Admiral Little that the seriousness of the situation on the Eastern Seaboard is fully appreciated and that all possible steps are being taken. As to the small craft mentioned … if your office will arrange for the organization of such a voluntary fleet I will see that they are employed.”51
King had come a long way. At COMINCH direction Admiral Andrews scoured the harbors south to Jacksonville for almost anything that could float. To Naval District commandants he ordered on 15 March: “Vessels in your district that can be purchased and are capable of carrying depth charges and guns and are fit for sea patrol report at once.”52 A large inventory of private power craft under one hundred feet was thus assembled and enlisted in the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Eventually no fewer than 1,716 suitable craft under one hundred feet were identified, 317 of which from the New York ports and harbors could have played a decisive role in sighting Hardegen’s V-123 on her first approach in January.53 On 2 April COMINCH distributed the first “Manual of Anti-Submarine Warfare for Small Craft” and later, on 2 June, printed the collected doctrine for minor patrol craft in an illustrated “Sub Chaser Manual.”54 By 17 June (�
�Finally,” wrote the exasperated writer of the ESF war diary), now a devoted convert to the place of small craft, whose importance in antisubmarine warfare, Andrews stated that month, “cannot be overemphasized,”55 King issued the following order to Andrews and to his counterpart Rear Admiral James L. “Reggie” Kaufman, new (since 3 June) Commander Gulf Sea Frontier, whose headquarters moved to Miami from Key West on the same date: “It has been directed that there be acquired the maximum practicable number of civilian craft that are in any way capable of going to sea in good weather for a period of at least 48 hours at cruising speeds. These crafts will be acquired and manned by the Coast Guard as an expansion of the Coast Guard Reserve. They will be fitted to carry at least four 300-pound depth charges and be armed with at least one machine gun, preferably 50 caliber; and will be equipped with a radio set, preferably voice.”56
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